To conduct a small experiment, Tim Groeling turned off his iPhone’s GPS feature during a business trip to Canada.
He wanted to see if he could travel in anonymity.
After downloading an application on his phone, the UCLA professor of communication studies discovered that turning off the “location services” was not enough to go entirely “off the grid.” The faint signals his phone received from cellular towers within the U.S. allowed the application to pinpoint exactly where he had been and the route he had taken.
Although many people demand uninterrupted telephone conversations and immediate access to social media and the Internet on their smartphones, some are less enthusiastic about the inevitable consequences that come with constant connectivity – namely, the ability for companies to view and record where a phone has traveled.
The issue came to the public’s attention in 2010, when Apple released iOS 4.0 for the iPhone. Independent researchers discovered a tracking file in the operating system that allowed the phone to store months’ worth of information about where it had been.
Though there was no evidence that the information was being sent back to Apple, and Apple soon “fixed” the bug to record only one week’s worth of data, the trust many people felt for their phones had been tainted, Groeling said.
Privacy is the main issue at stake, and the definition of the word may need to be amended to deal with a more interconnected world, Groeling said.
These notions of privacy vary among different age groups, he said.
“Students seem to be more comfortable with phones knowing their location, and they also seem to feel more capable of controlling it,” Groeling said. “Older generations, however, are put off by a technology they may not understand.”
Nonetheless, some students say they are still wary about their phones acting as a tracking device.
“Our generation is more comfortable with sharing information with others, but companies shouldn’t be able to see any information that is private,” said Wahid Chowdhury, a UCLA fourth-year computer science student.
Companies tracking phones can be useful, but phone users should be able to easily switch their phones’ privacy settings to eliminate unwanted tracking, Chowdhury said.
One of the main purposes for companies tracking a phone’s location is to optimize advertisement opportunities, said Michael Curry, a UCLA professor of geography who teaches a class called “The Networked World.”
“The desire to use the screen of a cellphone for targeted advertising is long-standing,” he said. “(Though) it does seem it is beginning to happen, the development has been far slower than many had predicted.”
But the technology also has its benefits.
Companies are creating applications that allow people to see who on their list of contacts is in close proximity to them, which has practical purposes for planning meetings or social interactions, Groeling said.
“If I’m downtown for a meeting and want to grab lunch with someone, it is much more convenient to see who is physically nearby than to go through my contacts, trying to see who is available to get a meal,” he said.
Groeling pointed to companies such as Yelp that are already using this kind of technology. Yelp allows users to type in certain search criteria on their smartphones, such as “Italian food,” and the website then comes up with a list of nearby restaurants based on the phone’s location.
This kind of convenience, however, also comes with the price of possible abuses of the system. Groeling pointed out that stalking, blackmail and surveillance also become much easier using tracking technology.
Part of the issue lies in the legal system’s inability to keep up with the pace of technological innovations, Curry said.
“One very important impediment to control the use of the data is the U.S. Supreme Court’s pretty strictly held view that what people do in public is open information,” he said. “(Thus,) locational information received from a cellphone should be treated, by inference, as public.”
As the technology becomes more common, more cases are likely to make it to the Supreme Court for review, Curry said. He added that it is only the beginning of a long list of issues that the courts will face about tracking technology.